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After a six week break, Rally Finland heralds the return of the 2008 World Rally Championship with a bang. One of the most renowned events in the calendar, the Jyvaskyla-based rally is a heady mix of flat-out straights, huge jumps that send cars airborne, and maximum commitment corners.

Demanding an acute knowledge of the route, putting even greater emphasis on pace notes, the prolific local entries are often the stars of the show. When Finland is your home rally, it is no surprise that Scandinavia has produced some of the greatest talents in world rallying.

Subaru World Rally Team star and Norwegian Petter Solberg is indeed one of these talents. He and co-driver Phil Mills set the stage record along the most famous of Finnish tests, Ouninpohja. Recording an average speed of over 130kph, this stage has however been excluded from this year’s event on the grounds of speed and safety. Indeed, along with the Swedish Rally, Finland is one of the fastest of the year. A real gutsy challenge where the brave will top the timesheets.

Based from the town of Jyvaskyla, one of Finland’s cultural hubs, the rally route winds through spruce forests archetypal of the region and skirts some of Finland’s 60,000 mirror-smooth glacial lakes. Serene as it sounds, the landscape is unforgiving and wayward cars stand little chance of dodging rocks and trees to rejoin the rally.

Finland is only the third event for the WRC’s youngest machine, the Subaru Impreza WRC2008, and the first time the championship will use the soft compound Pirelli gravel tyre. Having successfully completed its first two events, which were two of the toughest of the season, the SWRT engineers learned much that has been feverishly put to good effect during the championship break.

In contrast to the rough, rocky and inconsistent nature of both the Acropolis and Turkish rallies, the smooth, fast and flowing characteristics of the first non-European event since Rally Jordan in April make it a maximum commitment and confidence rally. Rather than an overriding onus on endurance and reliability in recent rallies, Finland marks a return to flat-out no-compromise competition right from the start.

The 2008 Rally Finland comprises 24 stages, of which five are new, totalling 340.42 competitive kilometres. The event starts with the traditional spectator stage at the Killeri trotting track on Thursday night. Run at the end of their summer, the temperature is expected to be around 20 degrees Celsius, milder than many would expect for northern Scandinavia.


Entries
The Subaru World Rally Team has entered two Impreza WRC2008s for Rally Finland. Petter Solberg and Phil Mills will drive Impreza number five, and team-mates Chris Atkinson and Stéphane Prévot will climb aboard number six.

Solberg and Mills have competed in Finland seven times in Subaru WRC machinery, and having finished fourth, third and second over the years, they are hungry for a win. Atkinson has only tackled Finland four times before, his first being aboard a Group N Impreza STi. His best result of fourth position came last year on his first attempt at the event with Prévot as his co-driver.